Evaluating 21st Century Skills

The website for the Partnership for the 21st Century Skills is a site that includes information about the importance of skills and resources needed to implement technology into the classroom. After reading over several articles, the one that intrigued me the most was "Route 21". I was impressed by the number of companies like Dell, Ford, HP, Verizon and even the U. S. Department of Education that are partners involved to help the organization. The Route 21 link has many good resources or educators and administrators. I was disappointed in the number of states that are participating. It is necessary for every state to implement 21st Century skills into the classrooms. Our students need to learn these skills while they are in school, so they can be successful after they graduate and enter into the workforce.
Educators and students must change in order to be successful in the workforce. We need to think about the future and realize how critical it is for our students to be able to use technology effectively when they graduate. Not to say they can't learn after graduation, but it will be much easier if they leave school armed with the knowledge, instead of having to face the workforce with little or no skills.

Using Blogs in the classroom

When I was trying to decide on how to use blogging in the classroom. I had to really think about how I would use it and then second would I even be able to use it because of the restrictions on using school computers. Then I thought about how blogging is similar to other forms of technology that the school system already uses. How different is it than email or powerschool where parents can log in and check their child's grades, or what about the schools website where parents, students and even strangers can go to a teachers website and read about the teacher or what is happening in their classroom and leave messages. So with that in mind I decided that I would start out by using it as a tool to post class-related information such as events and homework assignments and use it as a way to communicate with parents. If that goes well I would like to use blogging as way for my students to showcase writing prompts that are required once a month and then let their classmates score the writing by using the 6+1 trait writing rubric and leave comments for each other on how to improve or let them know which area they did well. I think this would be a way for the students to be able to see good examples of writing and also be able to see where they could make improvements in their own writing.

New to Blogging

Wow! I made it this far. I am currently taking a course on integrating technology into the classroom and as a assigment for the current class I am supposed to create a blog site. I thought I was pretty good with technology but I have learned that I haven't even scratched the surface. There are many many new programs and ideas that can be utilized to make teaching more interesting and keep the students engaged in learning. I hope to become more tech savy and embrace the opportunity to learn more creative ways to teach using technology and be able to share with my colleagues.